Daffodils grow on Mount Washington overlooking the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh. ‘This is a region that’s thriving and growing,’ says the head of a locally based not-for-profit organization.
Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP

He said he was doing it for Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh replied: stop polluting our city’s good name.

In withdrawing from the Paris climate accord Thursday, Donald Trump explained that he was striking a blow on behalf of American manufacturers such as US Steel, the company that once made Pittsburgh a global industrial capital.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the president explained.

To hear Pittsburghers tell it, the president might as well have been talking about Pluto.

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“As you can imagine, we are extremely disappointed,” said Michelle Naccarati-Chapkis, CEO of Women for a Healthy Environment, a locally based not-for-profit organization.

There was a time – 30, 40 years ago – when Pittsburgh was synonymous with the country’s biggest industrial interests and home to their worst ills. Ringed by the smokestacks of US steel, the city once choked on its own air and wanted for the kinds of regulations the Paris accord phases in worldwide.

“Back in the day we were known as ‘hell with the lid off’, and we had air pollution that impacted the entire region,” said Naccarati-Chapkis. “But this is a region that’s thriving and growing, and to depict it by its antiquated industrial past is really not a true reflection of what’s happening.”

However, since the steel mills mostly shut down in the 1980s, the city has been reinvented as a center for medical research, technology companies, healthcare – and environmental innovation.

Trump may have depicted a Pittsburgh whose past industrial glory is being choked by over-regulation. But the real story, people who live there say, is that environmental conservation has gone a long way toward freeing Pittsburgh from its industrial past.

Vivien Li, president and CEO of Riverlife, a local nonprofit, said she welcomed Trump’s having brought up her city in a speech sure to be watched closely by environmentally-minded citizens around the world.

“I think hearing Pittsburgh mentioned in the environmental context on the international stage really gives us the opportunity to remind people that the 21st-century Pittsburgh is very different from the industrial image that we had throughout the last century,” Li said. “Right now everyone wants to live by, work by, and play on the city’s three rivers, whereas 20 years ago they were seen as a little bit too dirty, maybe a little dangerous, and without the amenities there today.”

The quickest Pittsburgher to upbraid the president after his speech on Thursday was the city mayor himself, Bill Peduto, a Democrat. Peduto pointed out that while Trump may claim to represent Pittsburgh, the city did not want him to be president.

“Fact: Hillary Clinton received 80% of the vote in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh stands with the world and will follow Paris agreement,” Peduto tweeted. “As the mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris agreement for our people, our economy and future.”

On Friday, Peduto issued an executive order committing Pittsburgh to the Paris climate accords, joining a movement that in only 24 hours swept up hundreds of municipalities, states and businesses. The movement, led by the former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, counted 82 so-called “climate mayors” representing 39 million Americans, it said.

The true story of Pittsburgh, activists said,was visible in employment numbers and municipal planning. The city has 13,000 employed locally in renewable energy, according to the city, versus 5,300 in iron and steel manufacturing. The city has its own plan to reduce greenhouse gas production by 20% below 2003 levels by 2023. The plan wasn’t drafted to respond to Trump; Pittsburgh drafted its first climate action plan in 2008.

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The city is home to the world’s largest “green” building and the first convention center in the world to rank platinum in the US Leed (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification matrix. Wind turbines power lighting on bridges in downtown Pittsburgh that cross three rivers bordered by 800 acres set aside for habitat restoration and green spaces.

Court Gould, the executive director of the not-for-profit group Sustainable Pittsburgh, said the president simply did not know what he was talking about.

“I listened to the speech and was aghast at the depiction of Pittsburgh as having an un-futuristic economy,” Gould said. “President Trump, who lost badly here in the election, is grossly off target in identifying Pittsburgh and associating it with his outmoded, irrelevant vision.”

Perhaps, as Peduto put it, it was the first place Triump’s speechwriters thought of starting with a “P”.